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A note from Ray Carney: As the message on Mailbag page 114 indicates, the linked audio file to the Mike Leigh interview was sent to me by Matthew L. Weiss, one of the site's most devoted contributors. Several weeks after the file was posted, I received a message from Mr. Edward Champion, the interviewer whom Leigh mocks and jousts with in the course of the interview, demanding money for use of this file or for use of a transcript of the file on the site. I am sorry that I had not realized when I posted the file that Mr. Champion would demand money to use it. (And I am sure that Matthew Weiss didn't realize it either or he would not have sent it to me.) Therefore I have removed both the audio file and the transcript from the site. I deeply regret that Mr. Champion will not allow it to be used without payment of a fee. I would note that Mr. Champion has also insisted on an apology for the posting. He may consider this statement and the removal of the file as his apology.

If it's any consolation to readers, I'd point out that Mr. Champion's interview is not really that smart or that important, and that not much is lost by its removal from the site. The interview's main interest, and the reason it was initially posted, is described on Mailbag page 114 in the letter from Matthew Weiss and the letter immediately below it from Lucas Sabean. As they suggest, the Champion interview vividly illustrates how intellectuals (or pseudo-intellectuals) can deeply misread and misunderstand works of art, how their abstractions can get in the way of their understandings. (Click here to read the letters from Matthew Weiss and Lucas Sabean, with their reactions to the interview, if you have accessed this page without having read the discussion on Mailbag page 114.)

For a relevant and related discussion of how conceptions can do violence to perceptions, how ideas can war with experiences, how theories can prevent us from seeing what is right in front of us, I'd recommend reading the excerpt from the writing of William James posted on Mailbag page 118. (Scroll down several screens from the top of the page to read the note about, and excerpt from lecture 6 in William James's A Pluralistic Universe.) It nicely describes the problem of much of film study and criticism, the conceptual problem Mr. Champion's interview so vividly illustrated.

To read excerpts from an interview where Ray Carney talks about the hazards of intellectualism in film study and how to "think without ideas," click here. And to read a lengthy essay about the ways common cinematic styles of presentation "de-realize" experience, click here

This
is only the "To Print" page. To go to the regular page of Ray Carney's www.Cassavetes.com on which this text appears, click
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